I'm a theater lover. I am happiest when I am sitting in a theater. Or talking about theater. Or reading about theater. Or now blogging about it. If you’re reading this, you're probably a theater lover too and I hope you’ll keep me company as I blog my way through each Broadway season.

October 31, 2012

Hurricane Sandy has done its considerable damage and is now
gone. My husband K and I hunkered down and got through it
with no problems at all, save for a few flickering lights during the worst
hours on Monday, and we feel blessed for having done so.

Meanwhile, most Broadway shows, forced to shut down when all
public transportation in the city was halted on Sunday, are returning to the
stage, starting with today’s matinees. Still,
it feels somehow off to chatter about the shows I’ve been seeing when so many
people are still grappling with the storm’s devastating aftermath.

Large parts of the city, including Lower Manhattan, where
theaters like the Public and the Vineyard operate, are still without power. There’s
no subway service anywhere because many of the tunnels are still filled with
water. Thousands of people, including one venerable Broadway book writer, have had to evacuate their homes.

So although I had a post ready for today, I’m going to save it. Instead, I want to refer you to a piece my friend Howard
Sherman wrote about the lingering effect the storm may have on the theater community that we all love. Click here to read it.

October 27, 2012

With just 10 days to go before the election and Romney
steadily gaining on Obama, you probably don’t need anyone to tell you how
disappointing idealism can sometimes be, how messy democracy often is, or how money
always holds the power to corrupt. But just in case you need a reminder, the
Manhattan Theatre Club is presenting a revival of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of
the People, now playing at The Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.

Ibsen was a true iconoclast, dedicated to punching holes in
the hypocrisies of his day. In An Enemy of
the People, which he wrote in 1882, he jabs at both sides when the the forces of morality line up against those
of expediency.

On the side of righteouness is Thomas Stockman, a doctor and public
health official who discovers that the water in his town is contaminated and prepares a report detailing both the problem
and a costly remedy that he thinks will be well received because it will keep
people from becoming ill.

On the pragmatic side is his brother Peter, the town’s mayor
who is determined to keep the doctor’s findings secret because the news will drive away
the tourists who visit the baths in which the town has invested heavily and
that are its main source of revenue.

Her adaptation makes for
easier listening—and a shorter running time of just two hours—but my husband K
and I found the 21st century colloquialisms, including a lot of non-deleted
expletives, to be jarring in the mouths of 19th century characters.

The Stockman brothers are played by Boyd Gaines, usually one
of my faves; and Richard Thomas, whose work I’ve also enjoyed in the past. But both seem off their game in this production.

Gaines plays Thomas as more of a petulant naïf
than a man of burning conviction. Meanwhile Thomas turns Peter into a Snidely
Whiplash, complete with cape, top hat and a sneering smile.

The characterizations undermine the complexities
that Ibsen created. And it’s hard to root for either side when the advocates are so
unconvincing.

In fact, the entire production has the air of a melodrama
performed by a well-meaning but minor-league theater troupe, complete with overwrought
emoting, conspicuous sound effects and dreary lighting.

When that much is wrong, the buck has to stop at the desk of the director, who in this case is Doug Hughes. Even his idea of having actors sit in the front row in an effort to make the audience part of the play's climactic town meeting comes off as hokey.

In that final debate, the Stockman brothers compete
for the support of the townspeople. All
I can say is that I hope life doesn’t imitate art on Nov. 6.

October 24, 2012

It’s not easy to talk
honestly about race. And the fact that
it’s no longer just a black-and-white issue in this country ups the degree
of difficulty. Still, many of today’s
brightest young playwrights are taking up the challenge and the latest to
shoulder it on is Ayad Akhtar, whose ambitious new
play Disgraced opened at Lincoln Center’s still-new Claire Tow Theater on Monday
night.

Its
central character is Amir, who, like Akhtar, is Pakistani-American. Amir is also
as assimilated as a guy can get. He’s Ivy League-educated and on the fast track
to a partnership at a corporate law firm. He lives in a swanky Upper East Side
apartment and is married to a WASPy blonde named Emily who has a promising art
career. And his attitude towards Islam is determinedly casual, even a bit contemptuous.

But
the good life begins to unravel for Amir when, as a reluctant favor to his more
religious nephew and his liberal wife, he pays a courtesy call on a jailed imam
who has been accused of terrorist activities.

The
gesture causes the Jewish managing partners at his firm to doubt Amir’s loyalty.
It unsettles the relationship with his friend Jory, an African-American woman
who also works at the firm and whose husband Isaac is Emily’s art dealer. It
strains his marriage. But even more
important, it causes Amir to question his identity as a Muslim in a
post-9/11 America.

All
these issues collide in a liquor-fueled dinner party in which political
correctness is abandoned, racial epithets exchanged and the rawest of emotions revealed.

That’s
a lot to pack into a 90-minute play and I haven’t even gotten to the other
problems in Amir and Emily’s marriage. Yet, despite a tendency towards some
soapbox speechifying, Akhtar handles it all pretty well.

That's because he's created credible characters who push beyond the usual stereotypes. The people in Disgracedare like most human beings, sometimes arrogant when they're right, defensive when they're not but most often stumbling through the murkiness inbetween those certainties.

Akhtar gets superb support from a five-member cast that is sensitively directed by
Kimberly Senior. Leading them is Aasif
Mandvi who gives a kickass performance as Amir.

Mandvi is probably best known
for his satirical news reports on the “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” but
he’s also an experienced stage actor with credits both off-Broadway and in the
regional theaters (click here to read a Q&A with the actor) and he is
outstanding in this complex role.

Kudos
also must go to Erik Jensen, who stepped in at the very last minute to play Isaac
when the actor originally cast got sick and had to drop out. Jensen had only
been on the job three days when my friend Stan and I saw the show but he was
not only off book but had already begun to turn Isaac into a distinctive character.

October 20, 2012

Hallie Foote has been celebrated as the foremost interpreter
of the plays by her late father Horton Foote and more recently of those by her younger
sister Daisy. But as I watched Daisy
Foote’s latest play Him, now playing in a Primary Stages production at 59E59
Theaters, I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to see some other
actress in the part.

Like her father, Daisy Foote focuses on people who live in
small towns but have big dreams. He set his plays in his native Texas. She puts her in New Hampshire where she grew
up. Family dynamics fuel the action in the works of both father and daughter.

The title character in Him is the dying owner of his town’s
failing general store. He is cared for by three middle-aged children who have
never left home, are financially dependent on their father and desperate
because business is so bad that their own cupboard is almost bare of food.

The eldest is Pauline, a spinster who is haunted by the
memory of the unborn child she either aborted or miscarried years earlier and
by the feeling that life owes her more.
The middle brother Henry is a gay man who secretly yearns after a
married drinking buddy. And the youngest is Farley,
a mentally impaired man-child.

After the unseen patriarch dies offstage early in the
first act, the siblings discover that he had secretly bought parcels of land
that are now extremely valuable. This legacy has the potential to change everything about
the way they live—including their relationships with one another.

Comparisons between their situation and that of the dysfunctional
family squabbling over property in Horton Footes’ Dividing the Estate are not only unavoidable (click here to see my review of that) but underscored by the presence of Hallie Foote who plays a similar character
in both.

In fact, Hallie Foote’s portrayal of Him’s Pauline will be
familiar to anyone who has seen her in almost any other play in which she’s
appeared. There is the same slightly southern drawl to her voice, the same
jittery nervousness in her mannerisms, the same deadpan affect.

The effect can be entertaining and Foote won a deserved Tony nomination for her humorous supporting turn in Dividing the Estate. But Pauline is the
pivotal figure in Him and the role demands more subtle skills.

Alas, Evan Yinoulis’ straightforward direction is unable to push
Foote into new territory or to bring out the nuances that would turn Pauline
into a distinctive person. I sat there
imagining what a more inventive actor like Elizabeth Marvel or Marin Ireland
might have done with the role.

Other members of the cast fare better. Tim Hopper’s Henry is particularly
sympathetic and it’s great to see a gay man played as a regular guy without any
clichéd affectations, which is the way most of the gay men I know are.

And Adam LeFevre does an equally nice job with Farley. Actors tend to go overboard when playing the
mentally disabled but LeFevre makes Farley a particular person with passions of
his own, including a romance with a similarly impaired neighbor played by Adina Verson.

The three main actors step out of their roles at moments during
the play to deliver poetic monologs. It takes a while to figure out the
connection between their recitations and the rest of the play. Both Daisy Foote and Yinoulis share the blame for that confusionbut Him’s bigger problem cuts closer to home.

By
all accounts, the Footes are devoted to one another and nothing like
the battling kin in the plays they put on (click here to read a piece
about the sisters)and so I imagine that Hallie Foote will continue to perform the family's works even though it might be better— perhaps even for her—if she didn't.

October 17, 2012

Polls say that atheism is rising in the U.S. and that even
believers go to church less often than they once did. But God still seems to be
talking to America’s playwrights.

Faith was in the background of John Patrick Shanley’s 2005 Pulitzer
Prize-winning play Doubt, but it was front and center in his Storefront Church,
which played at the Atlantic Theater Company in June. And A.R. Gurney is currently offering a contemporary
spin on the story of Jesus in his new play Heresy at the Flea
Theater through Nov. 4.

Now comes Craig Wright’s Grace, a homily on faith,
love and forgiveness that opened at Broadway's Cort Theatre last week.

Theatergoers don’t seem to know what to make of all this
sermonizing. They’re OK with it if it comes cushioned in layers of irony or
humor, as it does in The Book of Mormon. But they’re much less comfortable when
the religious talk is earnest. And it’s
very earnest in Grace.

The story centers around Sara and Steve, a young evangelical
couple who have moved from Minnesota to Florida to start a chain of
religious-themed hotels; and their new neighbor, a NASA scientist named Sam,
who has not only lost his faith but his fiancée and half of his face in a car
crash.

It’s not a spoiler to tell you that the interactions between
them will end badly because the play actually starts with its final scene and
then flashes back to show how things got to that tragic conclusion.

And that’s not the only metaphysical trick Grace employs.
The action, the Playbill tells us, takes place in two identically furnished rentals
that are next door to one another. In
this production,designer Beowulf Boritt has created one set that
doubles for the two apartments and the characters often—and sometimes confusingly—occupy the supposedly different
spaces at the same time.

Wright, a former seminarian, might have made better use of
his time if he’d devoted as much thought to his plotting. For too many of the changes that
happen to his characters seem unearned. The audience isn’t given a chance to
see relationships build; one minute Sara and Sam are wary friends and the
next they’re considerably more.

And, perhaps in a bid to add some humor or to pander to
secular theatergoers, Dexter Bullard has directed Paul Rudd to portray Steve as
a priggish jerk, which undercuts the dramatic arc for that character.

Luckily, Grace has been blessed with a particularly able set
of actors. Rudd has become famous for his roles in Judd Apatow’s comic
movies but he's got admirable stage chops as well. And both he and Kate Arrington, a member of Chicago’s
top-notch Steppenwolf Theatre Company, work hard to fill in the gaps and, ultimately, make Steve
and Sara believable.

But the evening belongs to the indie-theater favorite Michael
Shannon. In his Broadway debut, he is simply brilliant as Sam.

Shannon, known for such flamboyant turns as
the frustrated producer in Mistakes Happen, gives a restrained and yet still compelling performance. You can see just from the way he folds his arms the changes that
occur in Sam as he dares to believe in his love for Sara and in the possibility
of God. (Click here to read a profile of the actor.)

And even though Ed Asner, forever famous as TV’s Lou Grant
and making his first appearance on the stage in over two decades, seems
slightly befuddled at times, he is enough of a pro to use that discomfort to inform
his character of a Holocaust survivor who now works as an exterminator. And, particularly in the second of his two brief scenes, Asner brings a kind of Old Testament-wisdom to the play.

The presence of three recognizable movie and TV actors
(Shannon has developed a following for his role as the federal agent on HBO’s
“Boardwalk Empire”) is drawing non-traditional ticket buyers to Grace. And they greeted their idols with enthusiastic entrance applause at the performance my husband K and I saw.

But I don’t think
that Grace will convert many of them into regular theatergoers. Certainly not the frat
boy sitting next to me, who threw back his head and laughed uproariously at each
small joke (the slogan for Steve’s hotel chain is “Where would Jesus sleep?”) but
spent most of the show’s 100 minutes squirming in his seat.

Grace is unlikely to convert any religious atheists or
agnostics either. Its theological message
is too fuzzy for that. But, if you
worship good acting, then you probably won’t want to miss Shannon’s
performance because it will make a believer out of you.

October 10, 2012

In some ways, the Theatre at St. Clement’s, a haven for so
many theatrical endeavors over the years, is the perfect place for Ten
Chimneys, a play about the legendary actors Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne that The
Peccadillo Theater Company is presenting there through Oct. 27.

But in other ways, the old church, which opened its doors in
1920 and has no elevators, isn’t a good place for this show at all. Because judging
by all the people leaning on canes at the performance my theatergoing buddy
Bill and I attended, the audience most likely to be drawn to this show is
barely younger than the building itself.

Somehow, however, everyone seemed to make it up the staircase
to the theater and I suspect that most of them had a good time once they got
seated. For playwright Jeffrey Hatcher has put together an amusing, if slight,
tribute to a storied era in the theater. Dan Wackerman has directed it
with obvious affection. And the real-life husband-and-wife actors Bryon
Jennings and Carolyn McCormick are delightful as the Lunts.

The problem is that I’m not sure who besides my aged
audience mates and a few slightly younger theater fanatics like me will want to
see this show. In their heyday, the Lunts were among the most famous stage actors in
the country. But despite having a theater named for them, they’re far less familiar to today’s theatergoers.

Even the Playbill acknowledges that. After the standard bios
of the cast and production team, it includes little cheat-sheet biographies of
Lunt and Fontanne and of Sydney Greenstreet and Uta Hagen, who also turn up as characters
in Ten Chimneys.

The title is taken from the name of the home in Wisconsin
where the Lunts spent their summer vacations.
It’s also the setting of the play, which begins in 1937 when the actors
were preparing a production of Chekhov’s The Seagull. Hagen, just 18, was cast
to play the ingénue Nina.

The story has often been told of how Hagen, who went on to
many great roles including Paul Robeson’s Desdemona in Othello and the original
Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, missed an entrance during the run.
Lunt, left onstage waiting, was so infuriated that when Hagen did
appear he took revenge during a stage kiss by biting her lip until it bled.

Afterward, Fontanne added insult to the injury by calling
Hagen an amateur in front of the entire company. In later years when she became a legendary
acting teacher, Hagen would tell the story herself, using it as a cautionary
tale for her students, one of whom was my buddy Bill.

Ironically the notorious incident never makes it onstage in
Ten Chimneys. Instead, Hatcher focuses
on the less-fascinating, at least as he presents it, domestic lives of his characters: Fontanne’s squabbles with her overbearing
mother-in-law, Greenstreet’s guilt towards his manic-depressive wife, Lunt’s
uneasiness with his bisexuality and Hagen’s feelings of obligation towards herémigréparents.

I’m a sucker for backstage stories, no matter how dated or
inconsequential, and Hatcher peppers his play with enough tidbits about theatrical
life, plus a few good bon mots, that I was satisfyingly amused. I even got a kick
out of watching the stagehands shove around the elaborate but endearingly
old-fashioned set during the intermission.

Still, Ten Chimneys has too much in common with The Grand
Manner, A.R. Gurney’s memory play about the Lunts’ contemporary Katharine
Cornell (click here to read my review of that). Neither tells a compelling enough story. If you don’t already
care about these stars of yesteryear when you walk into the theater, you’re
unlikely to care about them by the time you walk out.

October 6, 2012

It’s not often that I’m haunted by a piece of theater but AdA:
Author directing Author, a pair of one-act plays that opened at La MaMa this week,
won’t let me go. The funny thing is that I had no idea what the plays were
about when my theatergoing buddy Bill and I left the theater.And yet, even so, they gnawed at me.

Over glasses of Cotes du Rhone at Calliope, the nearby
French bistro that just got a rave in the Times, Bill and I tried to figure out
what we’d just seen. Then, right before the waiter brought our dinners—rabbit pappardelle
for Bill, roast chicken for me—Bill had an epiphany.

Once he shared it, everything we’d seen fell into place and
we both marveled at the ingenuity that went into it all. For as it turns out, AdA
is one of the most emotionally audacious ruminations on
loneliness that I’ve seen in a long time.

Now I’m in a quandary because I don’t want to say so much
that I ruin the thrill of discovering its secrets for you.But here’s what I can tell you. The plays are
by the young Italian playwright Marco Calvani and the prolific American
playwright Neil LaBute, who share a fascination with the psychodynamics of power
in relationships.

The two met a few years ago, bonded and decided they wanted
to collaborate on a project.Last summer,
working together at La MaMa’s artist retreat in the Italian countryside of
Umbria, they came up with AdA.

The two plays share no common characters or
plot lines but they are symbiotically linked to one another. One might work
without the other but the potency of each is intensified when you see them
together.

Calvani’s Things of This World comes first in the evening
and stars the great Estelle Parsons as an older woman and Craig Bierko as a younger
man who appears, at first, to be her butler. The pleasure of the piece comes in
the artful peeling back of the layers that conceal the young man’s true
identity, and that of another man sitting silently in a chair in the woman’s
living room.

The gender roles are reversed in LaBute’s Lovely Head.Here the older person is a man, played by the
accomplished veteran actor Larry Pine. He has purchased the services of a young call girl, played
by newcomer Gia Crovatin. Their
cat-and-mouse game is intentionally more explicit than the earlier piece but
holds surprises of its own.

All four actors are superb but it’s the women who are the
true knockouts.Parsons, who turns 85
next month, not only looks fabulous but has memorized a shitload of dialog and delivers
a performance that is simultaneously buoyant and poignant.

Crovatin, who has the coltish beauty of a high-fashion model, brings a
tense energy to her portrayal of a hooker who refuses to have a heart of gold and
keeps everything around her perfectly off balance.

Some of the credit has to be saved for the directors. As the
title suggests, LaBute directs the play Calvani wrote and Calvani does the
honors for LaBute’s. Each incorporates just enough clues into his staging without
ruining the mysteries of the other’s work.

They’ve also recruited a stellar design team, whose members
have created a spare but elegant production in which each small prop, lighting
cue and sound effect plays a significant role. I thought that set designer Neil
Patel had made a big mistake with the magazines he selected for Parsons’
character to read until I later surmised the subtly telling reason he’d chosen
them.

Not all of the mysteries are cleared up but I suspect the memory of these engagingly enigmatic plays, which are running only through Oct. 14, will linger with me for a longtime to come.

October 3, 2012

Even if you’ve been in a coma for the past month, the news
certainly must have gotten to you by now that the first of the debates between
President Obama and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney will be held tonight. A record-breaking number of people are
expected to watch.

But regardless of whether or not you intend to watch tonight’s faceoff, I’ve found what may be an even better way for us theater lovers to satisfy our
patriotic urges: it’s My America, an online series of 50 mini monologues about
the state of the nation written by an impressive lineup of playwrights that
includes Christopher Durang, Danny Hoch, Rajiv Joseph, Neil LaBute, Lynn Nottage and this year’s winner of the
Pulitzer Prize for Drama Quiara Alegría Hudes.

All of the playwrights were asked to write a response to the
questions “What is my America? Where is my America?” Their answers run between three
and 15 minutes in length and touch on such hot-button topics as immigration,
gay marriage, health care, income inequality, education reform, race relations,
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the definitions of life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness.

Each is performed by a kickass stage actor like L. Scott
Caldwell, Bobby Cannavale, Kathleen Chalfant, Stephen McKinley Henderson and
Jefferson Mays. The ones I’ve seen so
far are all totally cool. Some are LOL
funny, others defiantly provocative and a few downright touching. Together they form
a vibrant portrait of America at this moment in time. one
of best stage actors in the business, people

Ironically, the whole project is the brainchild of a Brit. The British actor, director and playwright Kwame
Kwei-Armah came up with the idea as a way to get to know more about this
country when he took over as artistic director of Baltimore’s Center Stage
theater company a year ago. He also smartly figured out that it would be a great way to grab some attention for the company’s current 50th
anniversary season during this election year.

So Kwei-Armah and his staff drew up a wish list of
playwrights. They wanted it to be diverse ethnically and geographically, by age
and gender and by political beliefs. The latter proved the greatest challenge.

“This is theater in America and there’s a leftward tilt to
that,” says Susanna Gellert, the
artistic producer of the project. “But we did want to figure out how to get
some balance.” She was particularly disappointed that the conservative
playwrights David Mamet and Jeremy Kareken declined the invitation to
participate.[Correction: Karaken did participate in the project; sorry for the error]

Another disappointment came when, Gellert says, Edward Albee
begged off because he was in rehearsals with Signature Theatre’s revival of The
Lady from Dubuque earlier this year. But, she told me in a phone interview, nearly everyone else asked
said yes. LaBute was so excited about the project that he's actually contributed
two pieces.

Kwei-Armah and Gellert brought filmmaker Hal Hartley onboard
to record the monologs and he spent about a week in New York and a day in L.A.
filming the performances in various theater rehearsal rooms.

The first 10 were
released online last Friday and seven more came out yesterday. A new group will be released each Tuesday through
Election Day. You can check them all out by clicking here.